Group: Members
Posts: 873
Joined: 12-October 01
From: the great wide open
Member No.: 277

hm, flac has way shorter decoding times / cpu usage than ape.

ape is fast encoding, yes, flac, too.But the decoding is important for portable devices, industrial support. and afaik, flac has already commercial support.if you look at the file size differences in percent %, you will see, it is neglectable.Lossless files are big, if 1% bigger, who cares ?and wait a short time and have a look at wavepack 4.0My personal favourites: flac & WavePack 4 in Hybrid mode.

ape is fast encoding, yes, flac, too.But the decoding is important for portable devices, industrial support. and afaik, flac has already commercial support.if you look at the file size differences in percent %, you will see, it is neglectable.Lossless files are big, if 1% bigger, who cares ?and wait a short time and have a look at wavepack 4.0My personal favourites: flac & WavePack 4 in Hybrid mode.

I don't know what you mean by "linux friendly", but there are Monkey's Audio Linux binaries from Frank Klemm's site.

I apologize for being vague. First, I had forgotten that the Monkey's Audio source was made available, even if it's not as "free" as FLAC. Also, when I said "linux-friendly", I was reflecting on the fact that I can, in Debian, simply do "apt-get install flac xmms-flac" and I'm ready to go. I do greatly appreciate the rarewares debian repository, and I see that Monkey's Audio is available there. I'm not sure if that includes an XMMS plugin, however. Also, by "open-source" and "linux-friendly", I believe that FLAC and it's development model would be found in much greater favor by the open-source and linux community than that of Monkey's Audio.

Of course, if you're a Windows user who has no plans to play lossless on a special hardware player, I'd say go with whatever looks best to you. Under those conditions, I'd have to say that the two choices are nearly equal.

I realize that the discussion of what defines open source is off-topic, but as you've left your original confusing comment I'll repeat:

APE, despite the availability of it's source code, is *not* open source (as defined by the OSI and, imho, as generally accepted by programmers of all kinds).

Real world effects of this are that certain influential Linux distributions will not include the code (Debian for one) which limits it's acceptance and use in the Linux community as does the fact that no open source (per OSI) programs can build upon the code unless they ask for it to be relicensed (which they have previously, and been turned down).

Also, each business that wishes to use the code will need to negotiate with the author the exact terms of use in advance, rather than deal with a known license that is in common use. This (imho) limits the chance of it being adopted by businesses.

Other miscelleaneous problems include the legal limbo if the original author dies or just becomes difficult to contact etc.

The above is an on-topic comment as far as APE vs. FLAC is concerned as FLAC is under an OSI approved licence (i.e. what I would call "open source") and for some people this is an important distinction and reason for choosing one over the other. And not *all* of these people are zealots or just the general kind of idiots you commonly find cheerleading for Ogg Vorbis.